Paul Bäumer, the book’s narrator, lugs his friend Kat to a field hospital. An equivalent scene appears in the novel. When one of them, Theodor Troske, was wounded by a grenade, Remarque carried the young man a considerable distance on his back, only to find that shrapnel had lodged in Troske’s head, resulting in fatal wounds. Many friends from school served alongside him. Remarque, who came from a lower-middle-class background in the German city of Osnabrück, was attending an academy for Catholic schoolteachers when, in 1916, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted into the army. The agony of destroyed friendship is at the heart of “ All Quiet on the Western Front,” Erich Maria Remarque’s enduring novel about life and death in the trenches. When the incinerated body lying beside you is that of a childhood neighbor or schoolmate, the trauma of loss is intensified. Other combatant nations did this to one degree or another, but Germany had a particular devotion to the strategy, whose psychological underside soon became clear. The assumption was that geographical bonds strengthened solidarity. During the First World War, the German Army followed a practice of localized recruiting, whereby conscripts from a particular town or region were kept together when they were sent to the front.
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